Horizontal Violence

Lucinda Zamora-Wiley

There are so many voices being raisedat once, trying to take back the silencethat once weighed heavy as a mattresson the shoulders of us, women…We wore silence in our smilesbehind our ears, on our knees,in the nooks and crannies. They saysilence is golden, but onlyin the sense of his gold tooththat flashed in her eye as he gruntedand rammed his way inside her.Or golden like the wedding ringon the same hand he used to crushher mouth—it clicked against her teethwith every unwanted thrust.

When one among us asserted her voice,they were waiting and watching;they shot their arrows quick as tonguesand mowed us down like weeds.

But we came back because droughtsonly last so long. The rain always comes.And though we can only stand in aweof the man that is our President now,we do still stand. We stand tall and pointwith our fingers, with our tongues,with our truth at the ones who now wishthey’d never had their way with us.

We are loud as quasars.We are loud as melting polar glaciers.We are loud as zippers opening…and closing, too.We are large and contain multitudes,and they are out of time.

Lucinda Zamora-Wiley is a poet who resides in Brownsville, Texas, transplanted from San Antonio, originally. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UTRGV in 2016, and it is one of her highest privileges to have worked with poets, Billy Collins, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Emmy Perez along her writing career. She looks forward to working with poet, Sharon Olds, in summer of 2018. Lucinda was recently nominated by this press for a Pushcart Prize Award in Poetry; the nomination is an honor for which she is profoundly grateful.